“Decentralization will change more in our lives over the coming years than possibly any other technological shift we’ve seen,” he says, likening the crypto rush to the Reformation. He describes building anarcho-capitalist city-states on the back of the blockchain. “If you’re going to built a new city, you’re not going to have the DMV – we don’t like the DMV,” he says at one point. Later: “We can actually tokenize the moon with a startup society.”

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not too keen on living in a city without a DMV.

Another day, another scam. Pretty small beer this one, thankfully. Though these TokenLot folks seem to be a good place to start enforcement actions, as they aren't even trying to pretend these aren't securities offerings.

Seeing as there isn't a specific thread for abject blockchain buzzword lunacy, I guess this is the best place to post about ripe.io, whose claimed purpose is to "is transforming the fresh produce food supply chain by enabling data transparency and transfer from farm to fork to answer what our food is, where has it been and what has happened to it. We’re exposing the journey of our food to create new analytics, automation and business models through blockchain technology and the Internet of Things[,]" and who would enjoin one to "[j]oin us in this conversation about the histories of our food and help us build the Blockchain of Food!"

Because someone calculated that the energy devoted to computers mining Bitcoins is similar to that consumed by the entire country of Belgium. Or was it Denmark? Either way, it is a massive waste of resources.

On the one hand, if John McAfee and the like think it's a good idea, it's obviously a terrible idea. On the other hand, as someone with basically no income at all at present, I sort of wish I'd bought one or two Bitcoin when they cost about ten dollars.

I want to make it clear that I'm not tempted to do so now, because people who know far more about this than I do (including all you lot) say it would be an awful idea. But given that with my savings I could just about afford to buy one still, right now, I'm curious: can anyone explain to me in simple terms why I shouldn't?

Again: I'm not going to do it. But right now I'm taking it as read that it's a load of bollocks in exactly the same way as a lot of other people are taking it as read that it's the best thing ever to happen. So in an Economics For Dummies sort of way, why doesn't it work as an investment opportunity?

If you want to throw some spare cash at it as entirely speculative punt, I'm not going to say you shouldn't. At least until this week, I would have said the bubble was going to carry on for quite some time until it burst. Now I think the timeline has accelerated, but still, it could go up a lot from here.

Just don't use any money you wouldn't be willing/able to lose completely.

So in an Economics For Dummies sort of way, why doesn't it work as an investment opportunity?

Because the investment opportunity is literally "it's gone up a lot in the past". That's not an investment opportunity, it's a selling signal. There is no rational market in the world where you should buy something that has increased in price as much as BTC has in a few days, on absolutely zero positive news. Moreover, the way bitcoin is structured, it becomes shittier the more it's used (higher transaction fees, slower processing times, more energy costs). So you tell me. What are the fundamental reasons you think bitcoin will be worth more, say, 10 years from now, than it is now. And if you don't think it will, why do you think you can time the market cycle?

There's also other factors, like the fact that a historically long-only asset will soon be shortable.

Incidentally, for those of you who want to stop websites from hijacking your computer's processing power on the sly so as to mine BitCoin (several sites have been found guilty of using JavaScript running on their pages to do this) you now have that option.